Week three

Wow! There seems to be so much to talk about this week!! I can say that I have truly learned a lot. First, I must say the Networks, Power, and Democracy was a bit over my head at times. What I did understand was that while in theory the Internet should allow for a more democratic society because choice and openness which should allow for a  more equal distribution of wealth, services, and goods, in reality this has not always been  as seen in the case of civil societies.  What I really found interesting was the example of the blogosphere that she used. When talking about the blogosphere Saskia pointed out the the blogs at the top, those with the greatest amount of traffic and reach, soon became more like traditional media sites where the information flowed from one-to-many simply because of the sheer number of followers; it became too hard to maintain a collaborative space.

Raquel Recuero surfaces the many issues surrounding social network sites. She did discuss the many ways that youth especially can become involved in activism for a more democratic society, how they can become more socially engaged and begin to think critically about important issues and topics. On the flip side she also addressed the negative side of social network sites such as privacy, sharing too much information, bullying, and most importantly discursive violence and discourse.

 The article I choose to read also examined the challenges found in the blogosphere.
The article I read for this week entitled The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution examines many issues surrounding blogs, klogs, blogs on intranets meant for employees to share on, and warblogging. Freire dealt with how to create a more democratized society through collaboration, co-creation of knowledge, and empowerment. His most most notable work being the Pedagogy of the Oppressed addressing what he called "banking education" (knowledge flows one way from teacher to student. Students are like empty banks that teachers are responsible for filling or depositing into).

Blogs can be seen as sites of co-creation of knowledge through collaborative efforts. Klogs are meant to give employees space to refine their tools of the trade and provide space to deal with issues. Klogs have not taken off because of issues such as management using klogs to monitor employees. Employees are often resistant to using klogs in the true spirit they were meant to be used  in fear of reprisal, " While klogs can craft a form of groupware to assist in this knowledge management, they can also appeal to business hierarchies that want to know what their employees are thinking and doing"  (Boese, 2004). Recuero also brought this up when asked about participation. She stated that her fear was that people would not comment on issues because they were afraid of the repercussions.

Boese also discussed warblogging, or blogging by journalists who are immersed in the war environment. These blogs are meant to bring a human face to the war, a much different spin than the whitewashed traditional mass media reporting. Yet, agencies such as CNN have shut down their journalist's warblogs for many reasons including the blogs challenged U.S. notions of who and what we are as a nation, "The challenge was to try to make meaning from conflicts between the two different universes of discourse, one severely restricted by mass media assumptions about the patriotic attitudes of the US audience, and the other, in the blogosphere, situated much more firmly in the discourse of international media coverage, which differed significantly from the U.S. war coverage in its skepticism toward the U.S. point of view" (Boese, 2004).

The theme running through each of these seems to be that there is a real disruption in long held notions of who creates knowledge, who in in control of knowledge, the ramifications of empowering the masses with the ability of fully participate in a public sphere that was once a very private sphere, " ...repression and backlash by elites are often the result of the 'oppressed' gaining too much power of voice and consciousness" (Boese, 2004).